The City With No People

Researchers have constructed some form of city or town but there are no people in it because the only purpose of the place is to test driverless cars.  That sounds like an impressive commitment of resources and intellectual talent but none of it will deliver anything much different than what you would get from this:

A car doesn't do anything all that different today than it did with a Model A Ford but the sound systems are much better and air conditioning is nice.

The unusual thing is there is tremendous research going into extending century-old technology rather than looking for something truly novel and finding a better way to do it.  The tremendous amount of money being spent on research isn't so much indicative of any pressing need for electric cars except in the general ecological sense of reducing emissions.  The electric cars are expensive, slow, and uncomfortable.  Anyone wanting that can get it more easily by joining the Navy and getting a job on a submarine.

That so much money is being spent looks more like an antiquated system trying to use technology to keep itself alive even though it's highly likely better systems could replace it if given matching research dollars, etc to get it done.

The first problem they are trying to solve is humans often need to get from Point A to Point B.  The second problem they are not trying to solve is humans don't want cars.

(Ed:  evidence?)

In Germany, there are outfits which are essentially providers for co-op cars and the same car may be 'owned' by twenty people.  They use a car infrequently and this meets their needs.  This type of arrangement is not at all unusual.


An example of predatory engineering from previous times is from how automobile manufacturers worked assiduously and undermined as they could any effort to build subway systems in American cities.  That skullduggery is part of the same ridiculous effort toward driverless cars now because it created the need for more cars than were really necessary by artificially manipulating those needs.


A car spends most of its time in the driveway where it continually loses money through depreciation and it only lives when you use it and spend yet more money.  The problem to solve is that it sucks when that car isn't there.  The problem no-one addresses is why it sucks when it isn't there.

Mostly people need first to get to a market and we want that car because we don't want to carry back heavy bags of groceries.  However, if the car can drive itself then why go to the market at all.  Send the car down there and the market people can put the stuff in there.  Or the market could deliver your order with their own vehicle just as they do now with services such as Peapod and others around the world.  So the market isn't looking like that much of a reason for a car.


The technology just isn't that impressive when it only extends a problem rather than really addressing it.  There isn't any particular ecological benefit in self-driving electric cars because the things have hideously-poisonous batteries and building hundreds of millions of copies of anything is ludicrous in the context of ecological discussion anyway.


Often hipsters talk of 'wearables' lately as if it's some huge feat to have a computer monitor your heart rate or do some other zippy trick to impress your friends.

I want a wearable that flies.  I'll throw on my wearable, flying, eminently-fashionable jacket and, through the amazing power of modern technology, fly off to wherever I want to go.  To hell with owning a car as that's a lot of stuff I don't need which frequently breaks and costs a lot of money to fix.  With my wearable, flying, eminently-fashionable jacket, I only have to get it dry-cleaned once in a while.